"I think we are seeing an absolute perfect example of a Catch 22 with many "issues" today. Bees and Pesticides seem to be the "Topic d'jour." 

I am a hobbyist bee keeper.  Anyone with under at least 50 hives is a hobbyist as far as I am concerned.  I also am a hobbyist gardener and raise enough stuff to give away what I can not eat myself and sell a dribble.  No rational person would ever call me a farmer.  I choose to use pesticides as needed on my bees and on the stuff I raise in the garden.  I follow the law and only use per label.  Those pesticides I use result in less health risk to me than the pills my doctor tells me I should swallow every day.  After all, a pesticide, by law, can not be registered if it causes cancer in any test animal.  The same can not be said about one pill my doctor wants me to take every day. It has been well proven to cause cancer in mice at a dosage that gives the same plasma concentration aimed for in human treatment.   A pill I refuse to take, but I am sure many people on this forum do take.  Many millions of people take that pill.  For every 100 that take it
 no more than two will ever benefit from taking it.  And that is being grossly generous with the benefit estimate.

Gardeners are people who raise a dribble of food.  A big gardener might even raise enough to make a modest living and provide enough calories of food to feed 20 people a 2000 calorie per day diet for 365 days.  Then there are real farmers who raise enough food to provide 150 or more people with a 2000 calorie per day diet for 365 days.  Plus those real farmers raise cotton to cloth people, wool to cloth people, honey for their enjoyment, etc.  There is no relationship between gardening and farming.  They are two different occupations.  They operate under two different economic models.  Without real farmers we would starve, have only plastic clothes, and not be very happy.  Real farming has nothing to do with gardening.  Real farmers use pesticides because they are cost effective, safe and environmentally friendly at protecting soil.  Gardeners use soil destroying equipment like rototillers or equivalent instead of protecting their soil by using
 herbicides more often than not.  Real farmers grow vast areas of monoculture thus require insect control with environmentally safe insecticides and/or fungicides.  Gardeners often simply pick crops that have little insect or fungal problems.

There are luxury items I really enjoy eating.  Bananas and peanuts for instance.  If we did not have highly effective and safe fungicides those would be 100% gone from the grocery store.  Both are produced by real farmers, not gardeners.

Could we please get back to talking about bees instead of nonsense about gardening?

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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